Theodore Winthrop's life, like a fire long smouldering, suddenly blazed
up into a clear, bright flame, and vanished. Those of us who were his
friends and neighbors, by whose firesides he sat familiarly, and of
whose life upon the pleasant Staten Island, where he lived, he was so
important a part, were so impressed by his intense vitality, that his
death strikes us with peculiar strangeness, like sudden winter-silence
falling upon these humming fields of June.

As I look along the wooded brook-side by which he used to come, I should
not be surprised, if I saw that knit, wiry, light figure moving with
quick, firm, leopard tread over the grass,--the keen gray eye, the
clustering fair hair, the kind, serious smile, the mien of undaunted
patience. If you did not know him, you would have found his greeting a
little constrained,--not from shyness, but from genuine modesty and
the habit of society. You would have remarked that he was silent and
observant rather than talkative; and whatever he said, however gay
or grave, would have had the reserve of sadness upon which his whole
character was drawn. If it were a woman who saw him for the first time,
she would inevitably see him through a slight cloud of misapprehension;
for the man and his manner were a little at variance. The chance is that
at the end of five minutes she would have thought him conceited. At the
end of five months she would have known him as one of the simplest and
most truly modest of men.

And he had the heroic sincerity which belongs to such modesty. Of a
noble ambition, and sensitive to applause,--as every delicate nature
veined with genius always is,--he would not provoke the applause by
doing anything which, although it lay easily within his power, was yet
not wholly approved by him as worthy. Many men are ambitious and full
of talent, and when the prize does not fairly come they snatch at it
unfairly. This was precisely what he could not do. He would strive and
deserve; but if the crown were not laid upon his head in the clear light
of day and by confession of absolute merit, he could ride to his place
again and wait, looking with no envy, but in patient wonder and with
critical curiosity upon the victors. It is this which he expresses in
the paper in the July number of this magazine, "Washington as a Camp,"
when he says,--"I have heretofore been proud of my individuality, and
resisted, so far as one may, all the world's attempts to merge me in the
mass."

It was this which made many who knew him much, but not truly, feel
that he was purposeless and restless. They knew his talent, his
opportunities. Why does he not concentrate? Why does he not bring
himself to bear? He did not plead his ill-health; nor would they have
allowed the plea. The difficulty was deeper. He felt that he had shown
his credentials, and they were not accepted. "I can wait, I can wait,"
was the answer his life made to the impatience of his friends.

We are all fond of saying that a man of real gifts will fit himself to
the work of any time; and so he will. But it is not necessarily to the
first thing that offers. There is always latent in civilized society a
certain amount of what may be called Sir Philip Sidney genius, which
will seem elegant and listless and aimless enough until the congenial
chance appears. A plant may grow in a cellar; but it will flower only
under the due sun and warmth. Sir Philip Sidney was but a lovely
possibility, until he went to be Governor of Flushing. What else was our
friend, until he went to the war?

The age of Elizabeth did not monopolize the heroes, and they are always
essentially the same. When, for instance, I read in a letter of Hubert
Languet's to Sidney, "You are not over-cheerful by nature," or when, in
another, he speaks of the portrait that Paul Veronese painted of Sidney,
and says, "The painter has represented you sad and thoughtful," I can
believe that he is speaking of my neighbor. Or when I remember what
Sidney wrote to his younger brother,--"Being a gentleman born, you
purpose to furnish yourself with the knowledge of such things as may
be serviceable to your country and calling," or what he wrote to
Languet,--"Our Princes are enjoying too deep a slumber: I cannot think
there is any man possessed of common understanding who does not see to
what these rough storms are driving by which all Christendom has been
agitated now these many years,"--I seem to hear my friend, as he used to
talk on the Sunday evenings when he sat in this huge cane-chair at my
side, in which I saw him last, and in which I shall henceforth always
see him.

Nor is it unfair to remember just here that he bore one of the few
really historic names in this country. He never spoke of it; but we
should all have been sorry not to feel that he was glad to have sprung
straight from that second John Winthrop who was the first Governor of
Connecticut, the younger sister colony of Massachusetts Bay,--the John
Winthrop who obtained the charter of privileges for his colony. How
clearly the quality of the man has been transmitted! How brightly the
old name shines out again!

He was born in New Haven on the 22d of September, 1828, and was a grave,
delicate, rather precocious child. He was at school only in New Haven,
and entered Yale College just as he was sixteen. The pure, manly
morality which was the substance of his character, and his brilliant
exploits of scholarship, made him the idol of his college, friends, who
saw in him the promise of the splendid career which the fond faith of
students allots to the favorite classmate. He studied for the Clark
scholarship, and gained it; and his name, in the order of time, is first
upon the roll of that foundation. He won the Townshend prize for the
best composition on History. For the Berkeleian scholarship he and
another were judged equal, and, drawing lots, the other gained the
scholarship; but they divided the honor.

In college his favorite studies were Greek and mental philosophy. He
never lost the scholarly taste and habit. A wide reader, he retained
knowledge with little effort, and often surprised his friends by the
variety of his information. Yet it was not strange, for he was born
a scholar. His mother was the great-granddaughter of old President
Edwards; and among his ancestors upon the maternal side, Winthrop
counted seven Presidents of Yale. Perhaps also in this learned descent
we may find the secret of his early seriousness. Thoughtful and
self-criticizing, he was peculiarly sensible to religious influences,
under which his criticism easily became self-accusation, and his
sensitive seriousness grew sometimes morbid. He would have studied for
the ministry or a professorship, upon leaving college, except for his
failing health.

In the later days, when I knew him, the feverish ardor of the first
religious impulse was past. It had given place to a faith much too deep
and sacred to talk about, yet holding him always with serene, steady
poise in the purest region of life and feeling. There was no franker or
more sympathetic companion for young men of his own age than he; but his
conversation fell from his lips as unsullied as his soul.

He graduated in 1848, when he was twenty years old; and for the sake of
his health, which was seriously shattered,--an ill-health that colored
all his life, he set out upon his travels. He went first to England,
spending much time at Oxford, where he made pleasant acquaintances, and
walking through Scotland. He then crossed over to France and Germany,
exploring Switzerland very thoroughly upon foot,--once or twice escaping
great dangers among the mountains,--and pushed on to Italy and Greece,
still walking much of the way. In Italy he made the acquaintance of Mr.
W.H. Aspinwall, of New York, and upon his return became tutor to Mr.
Aspinwall's son. He presently accompanied his pupil and a nephew of Mr.
Aspinwall, who were going to a school in Switzerland; and after a second
short tour of six months in Europe he returned to New York, and entered
Mr. Aspinwall's counting-house. In the employ of the Pacific Steamship
Company he went to Panama and resided for about two years, travelling,
and often ill of the fevers of the country. Before his return he
travelled through California and Oregon,--went to Vancouver's Island,
Puget Sound, and the Hudson Bay Company's station there. At the Dalles
he was smitten with the small-pox, and lay ill for six weeks. He often
spoke with the warmest gratitude of the kind care that was taken of him
there. But when only partially recovered he plunged off again into the
wilderness. At another time he fell very ill upon the Plains, and lay
down, as he supposed, to die; but after some time struggled up and on
again.

He returned to the counting-room, but, unsated with adventure, joined
the disastrous expedition of Lieutenant Strain, during which his
health was still more weakened, and he came home again in 1854. In the
following year he studied law and was admitted to the bar. In 1856 he
entered heartily into the Fremont campaign, and from the strongest
conviction. He went into some of the dark districts of Pennsylvania and
spoke incessantly. The roving life and its picturesque episodes, with
the earnest conviction which inspired him, made the summer and autumn
exciting and pleasant. The following year he went to St. Louis to
practise law. The climate was unkind to him, and he returned and began
the practice in New York. But he could not be a lawyer. His health was
too uncertain, and his tastes and ambition allured him elsewhere. His
mind was brimming with the results of observation. His fancy was alert
and inventive, and he wrote tales and novels. At the same time he
delighted to haunt the studio of his friend Church, the painter, and
watch day by day the progress of his picture, the Heart of the Andes. It
so fired his imagination that he wrote a description of it, in which, as
if rivalling the tropical and tangled richness of the picture, he threw
together such heaps and masses of gorgeous words that the reader was
dazzled and bewildered.

The wild campaigning life was always a secret passion with him. His
stories of travel were so graphic and warm, that I remember one evening,
after we had been tracing upon the map a route he had taken, and he had
touched the whole region into life with his description, my younger
brother, who had sat by and listened with wide eyes all the evening,
exclaimed with a sigh of regretful satisfaction, as the door closed upon
our story-teller, "It's as good as Robinson Crusoe!" Yet, with all
his fondness and fitness for that kind of life, or indeed any active
administrative function, his literary ambition seemed to be the deepest
and strongest.

He had always been writing. In college and upon his travels he kept
diaries; and he has left behind him several novels, tales, sketches of
travel, and journals. The first published writing of his which is well
known is his description, in the June number of this magazine, of the
March of the Seventh Regiment of New York to Washington. It was charming
by its graceful, sparkling, crisp, off-hand dash and ease. But it is
only the practised hand that can "dash off" effectively. Let any other
clever member of the clever regiment, who has never written, try to dash
off the story of a day or a week in the life of the regiment, and he
will see that the writer did that little thing well because he had done
large things carefully. Yet, amid all the hurry and brilliant bustle of
the articles, the author is, as he was in the most bustling moment of
the life they described, a spectator, an artist. He looks on at
himself and the scene of which he is part. He is willing to merge his
individuality; but he does not merge it, for he could not.

So, wandering, hoping, trying, waiting, thirty-two years of his life
went by, and they left him true, sympathetic, patient. The sharp private
griefs that sting the heart so deeply, and leave a little poison
behind, did not spare him. But he bore everything so bravely, so
silently,--often silent for a whole evening in the midst of pleasant
talkers, but not impertinently sad, nor ever sullen,--that we all loved
him a little more at such times. The ill-health from which he always
suffered, and a flower-like delicacy of temperament, the yearning desire
to be of some service in the world, coupled with the curious, critical
introspection which marks every sensitive and refined nature and
paralyzes action, overcast his life and manner to the common eye with
pensiveness and even sternness. He wrote verses in which his heart
seems to exhale in a sigh of sadness. But he was not in the least a
sentimentalist. The womanly grace of temperament merely enhanced the
unusual manliness of his character and impression. It was like a
delicate carnation upon the cheek of a robust man. For his humor
was exuberant. He seldom laughed loud, but his smile was sweet and
appreciative. Then the range of his sympathies was so large, that he
enjoyed every kind of life and person, and was everywhere at home. In
walking and riding, in skating and running, in games out of doors and
in, no one of us all in the neighborhood was so expert, so agile as he.
For, above all things, he had what we Yankees call faculty,--the knack
of doing everything. If he rode with a neighbor who was a good horseman,
Theodore, who was a Centaur, when he mounted, would put any horse at any
gate or fence; for it did not occur to him that he could not do whatever
was to be done. Often, after writing for a few hours in the morning, he
stepped out of doors, and, from pure love of the fun, leaped and turned
summersaults on the grass, before going up to town. In walking about the
island, he constantly stopped by the roadside fences, and, grasping the
highest rail, swung himself swiftly and neatly over and back again,
resuming the walk and the talk without delay.

I do not wish to make him too much a hero. "Death," says Bacon, "openeth
the gate to good fame." When a neighbor dies, his form and quality
appear clearly, as if he had been dead a thousand years. Then we see
what we only felt before. Heroes in history seem to us poetic because
they are there. But if we should tell the simple truth of some of our
neighbors, it would sound like poetry. Winthrop was one of the men
who represent the manly and poetic qualities that always exist around
us,--not great genius, which is ever salient, but the fine fibre of
manhood that makes the worth of the race.

Closely engaged with his literary employments, and more quiet than ever,
he took less active part in the last election. But when the menace of
treason became an aggressive act, he saw very clearly the inevitable
necessity of arms. We all talked of it constantly,--watching the
news,--chafing at the sad necessity of delay, which was sure to confuse
foreign opinion and alienate sympathy, as has proved to be the case. As
matters advanced and the war-cloud rolled up thicker and blacker, he
looked at it with the secret satisfaction that war for such a cause
opened his career both as thinker and actor. The admirable coolness, the
promptness, the cheerful patience, the heroic ardor, the intelligence,
the tough experience of campaigning, the profound conviction that the
cause was in truth "the good old cause," which was now to come to the
death-grapple with its old enemy, Justice against Injustice, Order
against Anarchy,--all these should now have their turn, and the wanderer
and waiter "settle himself" at last.

We took a long walk together on the Sunday that brought the news of the
capture of Fort Sumter. He was thoroughly alive with a bright, earnest
forecast of his part in the coming work. Returning home with me, he
sat until late in the evening talking with an unwonted spirit, saying
playfully, I remember, that, if his friends would only give him a horse,
he would ride straight to victory.

Especially he wished that some competent person would keep a careful
record of events as they passed; "for we are making our history," he
said, "hand over hand." He sat quietly in the great chair while he
spoke, and at last rose to go. We went together to the door, and stood
for a little while upon the piazza, where we had sat peacefully through
so many golden summer-hours. The last hour for us had come, but we did
not know it. We shook hands, and he left me, passing rapidly along the
brook-side under the trees, and so in the soft spring starlight vanished
from my sight forever.

The next morning came the President's proclamation. Winthrop went
immediately to town and enrolled himself in the artillery corps of the
Seventh Regiment. During the two or three following days he was very
busy and very happy. On Friday afternoon, the 19th of April, I stood at
the corner of Courtland Street and saw the regiment as it marched away.
Two days before, I had seen the Massachusetts troops going down the same
street. During the day the news had come that they were already engaged,
that some were already dead in Baltimore. And the Seventh, as they went,
blessed and wept over by a great city, went, as we all believed, to
terrible battle. The setting sun in a clear April sky shone full up
the street. Mothers' eyes glistened at the windows upon the glistening
bayonets of their boys below. I knew that Winthrop and other dear
friends were there, but I did not see them. I saw only a thousand men
marching like one hero. The music beat and rang and clashed in the air.
Marching to death or victory or defeat, it mattered not. They marched
for Justice, and God was their captain.

From that moment he has told his own story in these pages until he went
to Fortress Monroe, and was made acting military secretary and aid by
General Butler. Before he went, he wrote the most copious and gayest
letters from the camp. He was thoroughly aroused, and all his powers
happily at play. In a letter to me soon after his arrival in Washington,
he says,--

"I see no present end of this business. We must conquer the South.
Afterward we must be prepared to do its police in its own behalf, and
in behalf of its black population, whom this war must, without
precipitation, emancipate. We must hold the South as the metropolitan
police holds New York. All this is inevitable. Now I wish to enroll
myself at once in the _Police of the Nation_, and for life, if the
nation will take me. I do not see that I can put myself--experience
and character--to any more useful use..... My experience in this short
campaign with the Seventh assures me that volunteers are for one purpose
and regular soldiers entirely another. We want regular soldiers for the
cause of order in these anarchical countries, and we want men in command
who, though they may be valuable as temporary satraps or proconsuls to
make liberty possible where it is now impossible, will never under any
circumstances be disloyal to _Liberty_, will always oppose any scheme of
any one to constitute a military government, and will be ready, when the
time comes, to imitate Washington. We must think of these things, and
prepare for them..... Love to all the dear friends..... This trip has
been all a lark to an old tramper like myself."

Later he writes,--

"It is the loveliest day of fullest spring. An aspen under the window
whispers to me in a chorus of all its leaves, and when I look out, every
leaf turns a sunbeam at me. I am writing in Viele's quarters in the
villa of Somebody Stone, upon whose place or farm we are encamped. The
man who built and set down these four great granite pillars in front of
his house, for a carriage-porch, had an eye or two for a fine _site_.
This seems to be the finest possible about Washington. It is a terrace
called Meridian Hill, two miles north of Pennsylvania Avenue. The house
commands the vista of the Potomac, all the plain of the city, and a
charming lawn of delicious green, with oaks of first dignity just coming
into leaf. It is lovely Nature, and the spot has snatched a grace
from Art. The grounds are laid out after a fashion, and planted with
shrubbery. The snowballs are at their snowballiest..... Have you heard
or--how many times have you used the simile of some one, Bad-muss or
Cadmus, or another hero, who sowed the dragon's teeth, and they came up
dragoons a hundred-fold and infantry a thousand-fold? _Nil admirari_
is, of course, my frame of mind; but I own astonishment at the crop of
soldiers. They must ripen awhile, perhaps, before they are to be named
quite soldiers. Ripening takes care of itself; and by the harvest-time
they will be ready to cut down.

"I find that the men best informed about the South do not anticipate
much severe fighting. Scott's Fabian policy will demoralize their
armies. If the people do not bother the great Cunetator to death before
he is ready to move to assured victory, he will make defeat impossible.
Meanwhile there will be enough outwork going on, like those neat jobs
in Missouri, to keep us all interested...... Know, O comrade, that I
am already a corporal,--an acting corporal, selected by our commanding
officer for my general effect of pipe-clay, my rapidity of heel and toe,
my present arms, etc., but liable to be ousted by suffrage any moment.
_Quod faustum sit_, ... I had already been introduced to the Secretary
of War..... I called at ----'s and saw, with two or three others,----
on the sofa. Him my prophetic soul named my uncle to be..... But in my
uncle's house are many nephews, and whether nepotism or my transcendent
merit will prevail we shall see. I have fun,--I get experience,--I see
much,--it pays. Ah, yes! But in these fair days of May I miss my Staten
Island. War stirs the pulse, but it wounds a little all the time.

"Compliment for me Tib [a little dog] and the Wisterias,--also the mares
and the billiard-table. Ask ---- to give you t'other lump of sugar in my
behalf.... Should ---- return, say that I regret not being present
with an unpremeditated compliment, as thus,--'Ah! the first rose of
summer!'.... I will try to get an enemy's button for ----, should the
enemy attack. If the Seventh returns presently, I am afraid I shall
be obliged to return with them for a time. But I mean to see this job
through, somehow."

In such an airy, sportive vein he wrote, with the firm purpose and the
distinct thought visible under the sparkle. Before the regiment left
Washington, as he has recorded, he said good-bye and went down the bay
to Fortress Monroe. Of his unshrinking and sprightly industry, his good
head, his warm heart, and cool hand, as a soldier, General Butler has
given precious testimony to his family. "I loved him as a brother," the
General writes of his young aid.

The last days of his life at Fortress Monroe were doubtless also the
happiest. His energy and enthusiasm, and kind, winning ways, and the
deep satisfaction of feeling that all his gifts could now be used as he
would have them, showed him and his friends that his day had at length
dawned. He was especially interested in the condition and fate of the
slaves who escaped from the neighboring region and sought refuge at
the fort. He had never for an instant forgotten the secret root of the
treason which was desolating the land with war; and in his view there
would be no peace until that root was destroyed. In his letters written
from the fort he suggests plans of relief and comfort for the refugees;
and one of his last requests was to a lady in New York for clothes for
these poor pensioners. They were promptly sent, but reached the fort too
late.

As I look over these last letters, which gush and throb with the fulness
of his activity, and are so tenderly streaked with touches of constant
affection and remembrance, yet are so calm and duly mindful of every
detail, I do not think with an elder friend, in whom the wisdom of
years has only deepened sympathy for all generous youthful impulse, of
Virgil's Marcellus, "_Heu, miserande puer!_" but I recall rather, still
haunted by Philip Sidney, what he wrote, just before his death, to his
father-in-law, Walsingham,--"I think a wise and constant man ought never
to grieve while he doth play, as a man may say, his own part truly."

The sketches of the campaign in Virginia, which Winthrop had commenced
in this magazine, would have been continued, and have formed an
invaluable memoir of the places, the men, and the operations of which
he was a witness and a part. As a piece of vivid pictorial description,
which gives the spirit as well as the spectacle, his "Washington as a
Camp" is masterly. He knew not only what to see and to describe, but
what to think; so that in his papers you are not at the mercy of a
multitudinous mass of facts, but understand their value and relation.
Immediately upon his arrival at Fort Monroe he had commenced a third
article, which was to have occupied the place of this. It is inserted
here just as he left it, with one brief addition only to make his known
meaning more clear. The part called "Voices of the Contraband" was
written previously, and is not paged in the manuscript. It was to have
been introduced into the article; but it is placed first here, that the
sequence of the paper, as far as the author had written it, may remain
undisturbed.

VOICES OF THE CONTRABAND.

_Solvuntur risu tabulae_. An epigram abolished slavery in the United
States. Large wisdom, stated in fine wit, was the decision. "Negroes are
contraband of war." "They are property," claim the owners. Very well! As
General Butler takes contraband horses used in transport of munitions of
war, so he takes contraband black creatures who tote the powder to the
carts and flagellate the steeds. As he takes a spade used in hostile
earthworks, so he goes a little farther off and takes the black muscle
that wields the spade. As he takes the rations of the foe, so he takes
the sable Soyer whose skilful hand makes those rations savory to the
palates and digestible by the stomachs of the foe and so puts blood and
nerve into them. As he took the steam-gun, so he now takes what might
become the stoker of the steam part of that machine and the aimer of its
gun part. As he takes the musket, so he seizes the object who in the
Virginia army carries that musket on its shoulder until its master
is ready to reach out a lazy hand, nonchalantly lift the piece, and
carelessly pop a Yankee.

The third number of Winthrop's Sketches of the Campaign in Virginia
begins here.

PHYSIOGNOMY OF FORTRESS MONROE.

The "Adelaide" is a steamer plying between Baltimore and Norfolk. But as
Norfolk has ceased to be a part of the United States, and is nowhere,
the "Adelaide" goes no farther than Fortress Monroe, Old Point Comfort,
the chief somewhere of this region. A lady, no doubt Adelaide herself,
appears in _alto rilievo_ on the paddle-box. She has a short waist, long
skirt _sans_ crinoline, leg-of-mutton sleeves, lofty bearing, and stands
like Ariadne on an island of pedestal size, surrounded by two or more
pre-Raphaelite trees. In the offing comes or goes a steamboat, also
pre-Raphaelite; and if Ariadne Adelaide's Bacchus is on board, he is out
of sight at the bar.

Such an Adelaide brought me in sight of Fortress Monroe at sunrise, May
29, 1861. The fort, though old enough to be full-grown, has not grown
very tall upon the low sands of Old Point Comfort. It is a big house
with a basement story and a garret. The roof is left off, and the
stories between basement and garret have never been inserted.

But why not be technical? For basement read a tier of casemates, each
with a black Cyclops of a big gun peering out; while above in the open
air, with not even a parasol over their backs, lie the barbette guns,
staring without a wink over sea and shore.

In peace, with a hundred or so soldiers here and there, this vast
inclosure might seem a solitude. Now it is a busy city,--a city of one
idea. I seem to recollect that D'Israeli said somewhere that every great
city was founded on one idea and existed to develop it. This city, into
which we have improvised a population, has its idea,--a unit of an idea
with two halves. The east half is the recovery of Norfolk,--the west
half the occupation of Richmond; and the idea complete is the education
of Virginia's unmannerly and disloyal sons.

Why Secession did not take this great place when its defenders numbered
a squad of officers and three hundred men is mysterious. Floyd and his
gang were treacherous enough. What was it? Were they imbecile? Were they
timid? Was there, till too late, a doubt whether the traitors at home in
Virginia would sustain them in an overt act of such big overture as an
attempt here? But they lost the chance, and with it lost the key of
Virginia, which General Butler now holds, this 30th day of May, and will
presently begin to turn in the lock.

Three hundred men to guard a mile and a half of ramparts! Three hundred
to protect some sixty-five broad acres within the walls! But the place
was a Thermopylae, and there was a fine old Leonidas at the head of its
three hundred. He was enough to make Spartans of them. Colonel Dimmick
was the man,--a quiet, modest, shrewd, faithful, Christian gentleman;
and he held all Virginia at bay. The traitors knew, that, so long as the
Colonel was here, these black muzzles with their white tompions, like
a black eye with a white pupil, meant mischief. To him and his guns,
flanking the approaches and ready to pile the moat full of Seceders, the
country owes the safety of Fortress Monroe.

Within the walls are sundry nice old brick houses for officers'
barracks. The jolly bachelors live in the casemates and the men in long
barracks, now not so new or so convenient as they might be. In fact, the
physiognomy of Fortress Monroe is not so neat, well-shorn, and elegant
as a grand military post should be. Perhaps our Floyds, and the like,
thought, if they kept everything in perfect order here, they, as
Virginians, accustomed to general seediness, would not find themselves
at home. But the new _regime_ must change all this, and make this the
biggest, the best equipped, and the model garrison of the country. For,
of course, this must be strongly held for many, many years to come. It
is idle to suppose that the dull louts we find here, not enlightened
even enough to know that loyalty is the best policy, can be allowed
the highest privilege of the moral, the intelligent, and the
progressive,--self-government. Mind is said to march fast in our time;
but mind must put on steam hereabouts to think and act for itself,
without stern schooling, in half a century.

But no digressing! I have looked far away from the physiognomy of the
fortress. Let us turn to the

PHYSIOGNOMY OF THE COUNTRY.

The face of this county, Elizabeth City by name, is as flat as a
Chinaman's. I can hardly wonder that the people here have retrograded,
or rather, not advanced. This dull flat would make anybody dull and
flat. I am no longer surprised at John Tyler. He has had a bare blank
brick house, entitled sweetly Margarita Cottage, or some such tender
epithet, at Hampton, a mile and a half from the fort. A summer in this
site would make any man a bore. And as something has done this favor
for His Accidency, I am willing to attribute it to the influence of
locality.

The country is flat; the soil is fine sifted loam running to dust, as
the air of England runs to fog; the woods are dense and beautiful
and full of trees unknown to the parallel of New York; the roads are
miserable cart-paths; the cattle are scalawags; so are the horses, not
run away; so are the people, black and white, not run away; the crops
are tolerable, where the invaders have not trampled them.

Altogether the whole concern strikes me as a failure. Captain John Smith
and Co. might as well have stayed at home, if this is the result of the
two hundred and thirty years' occupation. Apparently the colonists
picked out a poor spot; and the longer they stayed, the worse fist they
made of it. Powhattan, Pocahontas, and the others without pantaloons and
petticoats, were really more serviceable colonists.

The farm-houses are mostly miserably mean habitations. I don't wonder
the tenants were glad to make our arrival the excuse for running off.
Here are men claiming to have been worth forty thousand dollars, half in
biped property, half in all other kinds, and they lived in dens such
as a drayman would have disdained and a hod-carrier only accepted on
compulsion.

PHYSIOGNOMY OF WATER.

Always beautiful! the sea cannot be spoilt. Our fleet enlivens it
greatly. Here is the flag-ship "Cumberland" _vis-a-vis_ the fort. Off to
the left are the prizes, unlucky schooners, which ought to be carrying
pine wood to the kitchens of New York, and new potatoes and green peas
for the wood to operate upon. This region, by the way, is New York's
watermelon patch for early melons; and if we do not conquer a peace here
pretty soon, the Jersey fruit will have the market to itself.

Besides stately flag-ships and poor little bumboat schooners, transports
are coming and going with regiments or provisions for the same. Here,
too, are old acquaintances from the bay of New York,--the "Yankee," a
lively tug,--the "Harriet Lane," coquettish and plucky,--the "Catiline,"
ready to reverse her name and put down conspiracy.

On the dock are munitions of war in heaps. Volunteer armies load
themselves with things they do not need, and forget the essentials.
The unlucky army-quartermaster's people, accustomed to the slow and
systematic methods of the by-gone days at Fortress Monroe, fume terribly
over these cargoes. The new men and the new manners of the new army do
not altogether suit the actual men and manners of the obsolete army. The
old men and the new must recombine. What we want now is the vigor of
fresh people to utilize the experience of the experts. The Silver-Gray
Army needs a frisky element interfused. On the other hand, the new army
needs to be taught a lesson in _method_ by the old; and the two combined
will make the grand army of civilization.

THE FORCES.

When I arrived, Fort Monroe and the neighborhood were occupied by two
armies.

1. General Butler.

2. About six thousand men, here and at Newport's News.

Making together more than twelve thousand men.

Of the first army, consisting of the General, I will not speak. Let his
past supreme services speak for him, as I doubt not the future will.

Next to the array of a man comes the army of men. Regulars a few, with
many post officers, among them some very fine and efficient fellows.
These are within the post. Also within is the Third Regiment of
Massachusetts, under Colonel Wardrop, the right kind of man to have, and
commanding a capital regiment of three-months men, neatly uniformed in
gray, with cocked felt hats.

Without the fort, across the moat, and across the bridge connecting this
peninsula of sand with the nearest side of the mainland, are encamped
three New York regiments. Each is in a wheat field, up to its eyes in
dust. In order of precedence they come One, Two, and Five; in order
of personal splendor of uniform they come Five, One, Two; in order of
exploits they are all in the same negative position at present; and the
Second has done rather the most robbing of hen-roosts.

The Fifth, Duryea's Zouaves, lighten up the woods brilliantly with their
scarlet legs and scarlet head-pieces.

* * * * *

These last words were written upon the day that the attack in which
Winthrop fell was arranged.

The disastrous day of the 10th of June, at Great Bethel, need not be
described here. It is already written with tears and vain regrets in our
history. It is useless to prolong the debate as to where the blame of
the defeat, if blame there were, should rest. But there is an impression
somewhat prevalent that Winthrop planned the expedition, which is
incorrect. As military secretary of the commanding general, he made a
memorandum of the outline of the plan as it had been finally settled.
Precisely what that memorandum (which has been published) was he
explains in the last letter he wrote, a few hours before leaving the
fort. He says,--"If I come back safe, I will send you my notes of the
plan of attack, part made up from the General's hints, part my own
fancies." This defines exactly his responsibility. His position as aid
and military secretary, his admirable qualities as adviser under the
circumstances, and his personal friendship for the General, brought him
intimately into the council of war. He embarked in the plan all the
interest of a brave soldier contemplating his first battle. He probably
made suggestions some of which were adopted. The expedition was the
first move from Fort Monroe, to which the country had been long looking
in expectation. These were the reasons why he felt so peculiar a
responsibility for its success; and after the melancholy events of the
earlier part of the day, he saw that its fortunes could be retrieved
only by a dash of heroic enthusiasm. Fired himself, he sought to kindle
others. For one moment that brave, inspiring form is plainly visible
to his whole country, rapt and calm, standing upon the log nearest the
enemy's battery, the mark of their sharpshooters, the admiration of
their leaders, waving his sword, cheering his fellow-soldiers with his
bugle voice of victory,--young, brave, beautiful, for one moment erect
and glowing in the wild whirl of battle, the next falling forward toward
the foe, dead, but triumphant.

On the 19th of April he left the armory-door of the Seventh, with his
hand upon a howitzer; on the 21st of June his body lay upon the same
howitzer at the same door, wrapped in the flag for which he gladly died,
as the symbol of human freedom. And so, drawn by the hands of young men
lately strangers to him, but of whose bravery and loyalty he had been
the laureate, and who fitly mourned him who had honored them, with long,
pealing dirges and muffled drums, he moved forward.

Yet such was the electric vitality of this friend of ours, that those
of us who followed him could only think of him as approving the funeral
pageant, not the object of it, but still the spectator and critic of
every scene in which he was a part. We did not think of him as dead. We
never shall. In the moist, warm midsummer morning, he was alert, alive,
immortal.

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Two hundred fifty years of slavery. Ninety years of Jim Crow. Sixty years of separate but equal. Thirty-five years of racist housing policy. Until we reckon with our compounding moral debts, America will never be whole.

And if thy brother, a Hebrew man, or a Hebrew woman, be sold unto thee, and serve thee six years; then in the seventh year thou shalt let him go free from thee. And when thou sendest him out free from thee, thou shalt not let him go away empty: thou shalt furnish him liberally out of thy flock, and out of thy floor, and out of thy winepress: of that wherewith the LORD thy God hath blessed thee thou shalt give unto him. And thou shalt remember that thou wast a bondman in the land of Egypt, and the LORD thy God redeemed thee: therefore I command thee this thing today.

— Deuteronomy 15: 12–15

Besides the crime which consists in violating the law, and varying from the right rule of reason, whereby a man so far becomes degenerate, and declares himself to quit the principles of human nature, and to be a noxious creature, there is commonly injury done to some person or other, and some other man receives damage by his transgression: in which case he who hath received any damage, has, besides the right of punishment common to him with other men, a particular right to seek reparation.

Writing used to be a solitary profession. How did it become so interminably social?

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Even when a dentist kills an adored lion, and everyone is furious, there’s loftier righteousness to be had.

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Forget credit hours—in a quest to cut costs, universities are simply asking students to prove their mastery of a subject.

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Instead, Kippnick makes her way through different subject matters on the way to a bachelor’s in accounting. When she feels she’s mastered a certain subject, she takes a test at home, where a proctor watches her from afar by monitoring her computer and watching her over a video feed. If she proves she’s competent—by getting the equivalent of a B—she passes and moves on to the next subject.

Most of the big names in futurism are men. What does that mean for the direction we’re all headed?

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During the multi-country press tour for Mission Impossible: Rogue Nation, not even Jon Stewart has dared ask Tom Cruise about Scientology.

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The Wall Street Journal’s eyebrow-raising story of how the presidential candidate and her husband accepted cash from UBS without any regard for the appearance of impropriety that it created.

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The piece begins by detailing how Clinton helped the global bank.

“A few weeks after Hillary Clinton was sworn in as secretary of state in early 2009, she was summoned to Geneva by her Swiss counterpart to discuss an urgent matter. The Internal Revenue Service was suing UBS AG to get the identities of Americans with secret accounts,” the newspaper reports. “If the case proceeded, Switzerland’s largest bank would face an impossible choice: Violate Swiss secrecy laws by handing over the names, or refuse and face criminal charges in U.S. federal court. Within months, Mrs. Clinton announced a tentative legal settlement—an unusual intervention by the top U.S. diplomat. UBS ultimately turned over information on 4,450 accounts, a fraction of the 52,000 sought by the IRS.”

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The announcement provided a dose of optimism in a conflict that has, in the last four years, killed over 200,000 and displaced millions more. Days later, however, the positive momentum screeched to a halt. Earlier this week, fighters from the al-Nusra Front, an Islamist group aligned with al-Qaeda, reportedly captured the commander of Division 30, a Syrian militia that receives U.S. funding and logistical support, in the countryside north of Aleppo. On Friday, the offensive escalated: Al-Nusra fighters attacked Division 30 headquarters, killing five and capturing others. According to Agence France Presse, the purpose of the attack was to obtain sophisticated weapons provided by the Americans.

Members of Colombia's younger generation say they “will not torture for tradition.”

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Where did it come from, and what are its intentions? The simplicity of these questions can be deceiving, and few Western leaders seem to know the answers. In December, The New York Times published confidential comments by Major General Michael K. Nagata, the Special Operations commander for the United States in the Middle East, admitting that he had hardly begun figuring out the Islamic State’s appeal. “We have not defeated the idea,” he said. “We do not even understand the idea.” In the past year, President Obama has referred to the Islamic State, variously, as “not Islamic” and as al-Qaeda’s “jayvee team,” statements that reflected confusion about the group, and may have contributed to significant strategic errors.